Speaker: Matthew Lawrenz, University of Louisville, US
Host: Kumar Gahlot, Institutionen för moilekylärbiologi
Venue: Major Groove, NUS
Abstract:
All microbes require trace metals like iron, zinc, and manganese as structural and catalytic cofactors, but in excess, these same metals can be highly toxic. As potential hosts for microbes, vertebrate hosts like humans have developed strategies to both limit extracellular access to these metals and leverage their toxicity to prevent microbial proliferation. These processes have collectively been termed nutritional immunity and are a key innate immune barrier to infection. However, all successful pathogens have evolved mechanisms to overcome nutritional immunity in order to cause human disease. In this seminar, I will introduce nutritional immunity and use the bacterial pathogens Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis - which cause human yersiniosis and plague, respectively - to highlight essential virulence mechanisms developed by bacteria to overcome nutritional immunity. Specifically, I will discuss the novel roles for two metallophores, yersiniabactin and yersinopine, in overcoming zinc limitation during infection. I will also introduce a unique evolutionary adaptation in the yersinopine system that occurred during the divergence of Y. pestis from Y. pseudotuberculosis that has resulted in a new role for this metallophore in overcoming copper-mediated nutritional immunity.